Yes, I know that you and other European friends are, as you put it, "totally confused" by what's happening here in the U.S. right now. Welcome to the club. I wish I could answer all your questions about America's current political/economic crisis with definitive certainty. But the situation is moving real fast, with one disaster after another, and with politicians flip-flopping all over the place.

As a result, it's difficult to know precisely what's going on, but I'll do the best I can. Here are my responses to your italicized questions about McCain, Obama, the financial crisis and bailout, and electoral corruption:

1. BEYOND THE "CRAZY" FACTOR

"Bush, with his policies and wars, has nearly wrecked the U.S. Constitution and economy and America's moral standing abroad. We don't understand why your John McCain, so closely associated with the Bush policies that brought these disasters upon your country and the world, should be nearly even in the polls with Obama. Have you guys gone crazy?"

Short answer: Everyone goes "crazy" for awhile now and again. European history is also replete with such examples. In the American TV age, celebrity trumps experience: We feel we "know" these candidates, since we've seen them on the big screen or had them in our living-rooms nearly every night. In recent years, don't forget, we elected a Grade-B movie actor as president (Ronald Reagan). We elected a professional wrestler and a professional bodybuilder as governors (Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger). We elected a song-and-dance man a U.S. Senator (George Murphy). By and large, those experiments didn't turn out well and did great damage to the body politic, but the fascination with celebrity is still there.

As to why McCain is nearly even with Obama in the polls, part of the
explanation is that racism is alive and well in the U.S. A healthy
chunk of the electorate, maybe 10% (and much higher in some states,
especially in the South), simply will not vote for a black man.
Sometimes, they're quite open about their reason for not supporting
Obama; mostly they hide their racism by citing other supposed
rationales: "elitist," "not one of us," "doesn't share our values," etc.

Then there's the mask element. McCain, for purposes of gaining the
presidency, saw that Obama's change&hope mantra had captured the
mood of the public. So, since his own issues weren't catching on,
McCain is now Mr. Change, has re-donned the mask of "maverick
reformer," and is running against the disreputable Republican record of
the past eight years.

McCain apparently is hoping that voters will forget he was a major
ultra-conservative part of that record -- he voted for Bush policies
90% of the time, for example, including approval of torture as state
policy. But that chameleon trick seems to fool a good many voters.
Plus, he added the younger, attractive Sarah Palin to the ticket and
she joined him in the charade about "reform" and "change," saying she
and McCain "will shake things up in Washington." But she's silent about
the extreme, rightwing nature of the "change" she has in mind.

As many wise men have said, you can't go wrong underestimating the
intelligence of the American voter. On the other hand, the more the
public sees and hears the one-note Alaska governor, and learns more
about her lack of qualifications and about the abuse-of-power way she
governs, the less attractive she looks as a VP and potential president.

2. FREE-MARKET SOCIALISM

"America in general, and your Republican party in particular, is big on
free-market capitalism, keeping the government out of the hair of
business. Now the Republican government, supported also by Democrats,
is making a 180-degree turn and urging regulation of corporations, and
using billions in tax dollars to prop up failing big businesses, even
going so far as to buy huge shares of these corporations. What the hell
is happening? To us in Europe, who have seen similar alliances between
government and business turn into authoritarian control, we can't
understand why the U.S. citizens are not revolting."

The corporate elites who control the political system here just want to
make profits. Most of the time, they do this best when they keep
government at arms'-length from them. But in times of crisis, they go
eagerly to Washington for help.

In short, in good times they're capitalists, in bad times socialists --
but only for the rich. Middle-class and poor folks recently got the
foot of a burdensome new bankruptcy law placed on their necks. But the
upper classes are provided privileged ways to avoid going under. It is
ever thus, but it's gone to extreme lengths in the organized looting
system for the wealthy arranged by the CheneyBush Administration.

What's been almost laughable is watching McCain, who has been a
deregulationist all his political life, on Monday talking about the
necessity for not letting government get involved in bailing out
failing businesses, and on Tuesday he's proposing that the government
start regulating these banks and corporations and get into the private
business of selling insurance and mortgages. From deregulator to
proponent of nationalizing giant corporations -- that's how fast the
economic-disaster quicksand sucked McCain into the vortex.

And Obama came along quickly as well, even though he has important
caveats of opposition. Though the Democrats are plugging for ways to
aid the middle-class in this economic bailout, neither party or
candidate wants to risk being held responsible for a full-scale
financial meltdown and collapse of the U.S. economy. So, at least for
the moment, everyone's theoretically on board.

"Too big to be allowed to fail"

The rationale for the federal bailout plan is that these companies are
too huge, too intertwined in so many areas of the economy, to risk them
going under. It's like the Italian government saying that the Mafia is
too big and thus too important to the Italian economy (read: jobs,
contribution$) to let them fail, so we'll just prop them up, look the
other way while the looting and violence takes place, and roll along on
our merry way.

Yes, of course, these corporations are huge, sprawling, multi-headed
behemoths, but the politicians never want to examine how they got to
the point of untouchability. How many times have we seen how
deregulating industry has resulted in economic and/or social disaster?
Anybody remember Enron? The S&L collapse of the '80s (in which a
compromised McCain was right in the middle, by the way)? And now
Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae? And Lehman Brothers? And AIG? And Morgan
Stanley? Et al.

The ghost of the 1930s Great Depression is hovering over the present
crisis. Indeed, so fast is the house of cards tumbling down, with more
major corporations expected to follow, that the politicians, regardless
of party, are falling all over themselves to create an institutional
feather cushion to catch these failing enterprises as they crash toward
insolvency. These are socialism-like measures, as was true in FDR's New
Deal days as well, designed to forestall another Great Depression and
maybe even revolution. Except these socialist-seeming solutions are not
designed to aid the bulk of the population, the middle-class and poor,
but to provide aid and sustenance to the wealthy titans of industry.
The rest of us will be expected to pay the bill, probably more than a
trillion dollars when all is said and done, since the plan also may
include bailing out troubled foreign banks who dived into the giant
profit-making machine in the U.S. (This massive federal bailout is
being considered at the same time when the cost for America's current
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is approaching the trillion-dollar mark.)

The proposed federal bailout of the failing corporations is the
ultimate crime caper, well understood by those who have read Naomi
Klein's "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism." Few in
their right mind would agree to any of this in normal times, especially
expressing a willingness to trust this same President and
Administration who have proven themselves reckless, incompetent,
secretive, lying power-mongers. But under leaked provisons of the plan,
Congress would turn over virtually full control of the trillion-plus
dollars for this new program to the Executive Branch (via the Treasury
Secretary), with no outside oversight permitted, not by Congress and
not by the courts. Here's the wording in the original plan: "Decisions
by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are
non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be
reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."

Given the massive effects on the body/social politic, it really doesn't
matter if the use of "shock-doctrine" tactics happens as a conscious
elitist plot to foment the crisis or follows a genuine crisis that,
willy nilly, provides the plutocrats with their opportunity to use the
catastrophe to their own economic and power benefit. The result is the
same: Ordinary citizens, especially in the middle-class, take it in the
neck -- and wallet -- and constitutional government is damaged badly.

The inevitable fallout from greed

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told an anxious public the other day
that things should get better now that the government is dealing with
the "heart of the matter." He seems to think the "heart of the matter"
has to do with moving cash around to keep the house of cards propped
up, at least in the public mind.

But the "heart of the matter" has to do with the promulgation of greed
as the operating principle in American economic (and social and
political) life. It's been that way openly for the past 30 years, at
least since Reagan's presidency. We profess shock, shock!, when after a
few years that principle leads inexorably to disaster. When those
crises develop, invariably the elites arrange themselves massive
bailouts, the corporate executives suffer nary a wit, the taxpayers
(and their children and grandchildren) are expected to meekly pony up,
and then, there being no accountability for bad management, these
ethically-challenged magnates feel free to go out and do the same thing
again until the next major crisis.

In fact, the moral lesson many CEOs might derive from this experience
is: If you're going to engage in high-stakes over-leveraging and
gambling on derivatives, don't do it in a small-scale way. Make your
corporations so very huge and so important to the system that nobody
will want to risk upsetting the social/financial apple cart. So be sure
to put at risk as much investor-money as you possibly can and that way,
if something goes wrong (and inevitably it will), you'll get bailed out
by the government. Small scams will get you nothing and might even lead
to you getting arrested; but humongous unwise schemes, the bigger the
better, will give you a free ride at taxpayers' expense. Which mostly
means by us small-fry.

It IS crazy. And angering. And not just to liberals; many conservatives
also are horrified by the ramifications of the governmental bailout.
(As I write this, it's still not clear if and when the much-amended
bailout plan might be voted on and whether it will pass in anything
close to its original outline.)

3. OBAMA CAN'T/WON'T DO IT ALL

"Will Obama really make a difference? Can he? Didn't Bush and Cheney
and their cronies mess things up so badly that nobody will be able to
do much?"

Short answer: Yes, even if Obama wanted to institute major changes, he
would have to face the unenviable task of trying to undo all the damage
done by this Administration. To do so successfully might take a decade
or two, especially because HardRightists have been placed into key
positions in the bureaucracy, judiciary, and mass-media outlets. Even
if McCain loses, Obama will face a constant, nasty battle to get
anything decent done. (And if the Democrats in November don't pick up
enough seats in the Senate to block Republican filibusters, the job
will be even more difficult.)

Many progressives/liberals have chosen to believe that Obama is one of
them and is willing, indeed eager, to shake up the system in a radical
way. Don't count on it. I am enthusiastically working for and donating
money to his campaign, but I have lowered my expectations. Obama is a
centrist with some liberal leanings, but beholden to many of the same
elitist forces that dominate most power-centers in this country. And
his foreign-policy views, while more cautious and realistic, rest on
the dangerous exceptionalist premise that the U.S. should be the
military policeman in the world.

Obama certainly is bright, thoughtful, and full of good ideas, but the
best we can expect would be something like Bill Clinton. Given how far
right the country has moved in the past several decades -- the center
is now regarded as "left" -- we on the progressive end of the spectrum
will have to spend a lot of time and effort pressuring a President
Obama to do what's right, given the other forces operating on him. I
continue to believe that Obama has within him the possibility of being
a dynamic, transformational president, but we shouldn't expect him to
be a progressive superman. That's not who he is.

4. THE ROLE OF POLITICAL PARTIES

"Is there any kind of party loyalty and discipline in your presidential
elections? Or do voters in America make their decision purely on
personal, rather than policy, matters."

Short answers: No and yes. Americans have a disconnect when voting for
president. What the parties stand for hardly matters anymore. How the
candidates have voted and behaved in the past tends not to count for
all that much either. Sad to say, what seems of most importance is
biography and how "comfortable" citizens feel with a candidate rather
than with the issues and party. Voting from this perspective makes no
rational, or even political, sense -- especially since citizens are
often voting against their own economic and social interests. Which
helps explain why there's such "buyer-remorse" several years later when
they see what they got and their rational mind kicks in.

Short answer: Not much. A few states have reacted to the unreliable,
easily-hackable touch-screen computers by going to optical-scanning
machines that leave a paper record. But about one-third of the voting
public in November will still cast ballots on touch-screen machines,
many in key battleground states. The more pressing scandal is that
vote-tabulation for all forms of voting remains outsourced to
Republican-supporting corporations using secret software. Those voting
totals, it has been publicly demonstrated, can be altered by a
technician or hacker in less than a minute, leaving no indication of
tampering. (The puzzling additional scandal is that the Democratic
Party has shown no interest in publicizing these vulnerabilities, and
the corporate media is complicit as well by its silence.)

In short, Americans have no real certainty that their votes have been,
or will be in November, accurately recorded. Rove and his minions are
trying to keep the polling-gap between the two candidates to just a few
percentage points so that whatever illegal manipulations take place
will not be so noticeable. In addition, hundreds of thousands of likely
Democratic voters are being purged from the voting lists in key states,
or are being victimized by GOP scams of one sort or another, especially
with regard to absentee ballots. Once again, in a close election,
electoral theft is a real possibility, as happened in the past two
presidential contests, judging from the available evidence.

Well, Jacqueline and Wolfgang, let's stop there and deal with your
other questions at another time. I wish you good luck in your own home
countries, as they suffer "tsunami"-like effects on their economies and
political structures because of what's happening here in the States.
Good luck and stay in touch.

All best, Bernie.

Bernard Weiner,
Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at
Western Washington University and San Diego State University, worked as
a writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and
currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers
(www.crisispapers.org). To comment: crisispapers@comcast.net.

MrQuestion
Perhaps an addendum to this discussion is we have a very powerful "conservative" talk radio base in this country. Led by Rush Limbaugh who commands legions of what are affectionately called "dittoheads"

They probably comprise 35% of the electorate and they think as a group. If Rush mocks Obamas speech - suddenly all the dittoheads are doing it.

Largely because of these folks there is never any discussions of raising taxes to pay for the US's foibles. It would be suicide politically.

The conservative mantra - which 15 years ago was "balanced budget" is now "Lower taxes - don't talk about deficits"

Some serious persons don't see all this as an accident. For a serious discussion of this:

Google this phrase 'The Deficit That Didn't Just Happen'

This current meltdown is described and part of the republican uppercrust plan to force privatizing social security. It sounds crazy but everything Bush has done has had the effect of creating huge unfunded liabilities - two wars - Katrina rebuild - huge cavalier deficits - and now as he's walking out the door - the giant 840 billion dollar crap sandwich.

These people all believe Ronald Reagan was a saint this is W's shot to out-Reagan Reagan.

The American stupidity on this frankly is a function of how no public figure will address it. And how easily the dittoheads are led around.

ItĂ˘â‚¬â„˘s too simplistic and self-serving to claim that Ă˘â‚¬Ĺ“racismĂ˘â‚¬Âť is to blame for much of Mr. ObamaĂ˘â‚¬â„˘s still-uncertain prospects. There are large numbers, I think, who simply have substantive prudential objections to the hardly-successful programs and hundreds of billions spent by vote-desperate Beltway pols for 30-plus years while imposing an official public line that the money was well and effectively spent. Lumping in citizens hesitant to keep all that going with the out-and-out racists of the pre-1965 civil rights era does not yield an accurate picture of the complexity posed in the upcoming election.

The Ă˘â‚¬Ĺ“promulgation of greedĂ˘â‚¬Âť was certainly one of the most dangerous conceptual developments in 1980s America. The Republicans managed to squeeze it into the vacuum created by the DemocratsĂ˘â‚¬â„˘ abandonment of Ă˘â‚¬ËśvirtueĂ˘â‚¬â„˘ since Ă˘â‚¬ËśvirtueĂ˘â‚¬â„˘ Ă˘â‚¬â€ś along with Ă˘â‚¬ËśtraditionĂ˘â‚¬â„˘ and Ă˘â‚¬ËśreasonĂ˘â‚¬â„˘ Ă˘â‚¬â€ś were suddenly discovered to be nothing but Ă˘â‚¬ËśabstractionsĂ˘â‚¬â„˘ and tools to oppress Ă˘â‚¬ËśwomenĂ˘â‚¬â„˘ and others; the removal of so vital a chunk of the conceptual and moral foundations of American culture and society created a monstrous vacuum that deeply deformed government and politics as well as society and culture. Into this desolation Ă˘â‚¬ËśgreedĂ˘â‚¬â„˘ and the rule of the wealthy were introduced, and in the murk actually looked like Ă˘â‚¬ËśgoodĂ˘â‚¬â„˘ things Ă˘â‚¬â€ś and here we are today.

It is too too true that American voters have become besotted with Ă˘â‚¬ËścelebrityĂ˘â‚¬â„˘ and no longer vote on the issues. The voters now behave like bobby-soxers at a young Sinatra or Beatles show. How much this has to do with the rise of Ă˘â‚¬ËśfeelingsĂ˘â‚¬â„˘ over Ă˘â‚¬ËśreasonĂ˘â‚¬â„˘ associated with the Second Wave of Feminism and the embrace of Ă˘â‚¬ËśyouthĂ˘â‚¬â„˘ as voters is a question that has yet to be dealt with. There is indeed a monstrous corruption in the political system: PACs (a Democratic invention) are nothing but channels for legally bribing the Congressional gentlefolk sworn to serve the whole people. But there is a conceptual and psychological corrosion, as well, and nobody seems to want to go near that yet Ă˘â‚¬â€ś though it is as dangerous, perhaps more, than the PACs.